Zhang Hua's Back Yard

by Luo Fei

It is clear that Zhang Hua's art is not collegiate or based on research, but comes from his own living world. For Zhang Hua, it was not a world of subjects to be explored, not a problem to be solved or invented, it was an intuitive world. For Zhang Hua, it is the richness of his memories and experiences that have been precipitated day after day since he was a child, through his interactions with the mountains of Yunnan and with its people. We can see in Zhang Hua's work (and not just in a particular piece) that he has a deep emotional connection to the mountains of his homeland, to the folk crafts hidden in the Yunnan countryside, and that from this spills over into his imagination of a hidden world. It is for this reason that Zhang Hua's art is difficult to categorise or serialise, and it is difficult to appreciate the energy of his labour even from a single piece of work. But when they come together, you find that they seem to be forming a forest, where images from all directions emerge one by one in a process of refinement and refinement, interconnected and richly layered, like the interdependence of a forest colony and a tree, with spiders and foxes hidden within. These images grow slowly, day after day, in the artist's labours, in a variety and subtlety, in a warmth that is astonishing!

In such a living world, people are connected to themselves, to others, to the past, to myths, to everything. Craftsmanship is the artist's unique language for connecting with everything.

12 February, 2022, Kunmming